Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is kicking off its annual Discover conference this week with a host of announcements aimed at moving its hybrid cloud initiative ahead and folding artificial intelligence into its infrastructure management offerings.

Updates include the extension of current machine-learning-driven operations and composable infrastructure options across its portfolio, new workload-optimized infrastructure, a new high-end storage offering with intelligent management and enhancements to the Aruba Central cloud-based network management platform.

Composable infrastructure combines compute, storage and networking into a utility model that can be managed by software and scaled up and down as needed. The company today is extending composable support to include existing ProLiant DL 380/360/560 Gen10 rack-based servers. HPE’s Composable Cloud, which is based on the company’s OneView and Composable Fabric infrastructure management suites, will enable new HPE ProLiant DL customers to deploy and scale workloads across a composable rack environment.

HPE is also enhancing its SimpliVity hyperconverged infrastructure offering by integrating InfoSight, an operations management tool that simplifies virtual machine management. InfoSight, which HPE picked up with its acquisition of flash storage maker Nimble Storage Inc. two years ago, uses predictive data analytics to recommend ways to improve performance on supported infrastructure. Among the issues it reportedly can address are stranded capacity, sub-optimal workloads, needed firmware upgrades and virtual machine optimization, said Lauren Whitehouse, director of software-defined and cloud group marketing at HPE.

New SimpliVity models are being added to address remote office and other edge-computing scenarios. The 325 comes in a dense 1U enclosure with a single Advanced Micro Devices Inc. EPYC CPU and all-flash storage. It can be combined with SimpliVity 380, a node that’s optimized for long-term storage, and which can centrally aggregate copies from multiple SimpliVity sites.

Also new is HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, a “disaggregated” HCI that combines hyperconverged control with self-managing storage and InfoSight management on a ProLiant server. Disaggregated architectures separate storage and compute functions onto separate nodes. HPE said Nimble Storage dHCI delivers 99.9999% data availability and submillisecond latency.

“If you have multicloud applications that require the availability and resiliency of direct-attached storage, you have a lot of overhead of managing that environment,” Whitehouse said. “Nimble Storage dHCI gets you the reliability of direct-attached with the flexibility of network storage.”

New high-end storage platform

In the enterprise storage realm, HPE is announcing Primera, a high-end storage platform that uses InfoSight to predict and prevent issues across the infrastructure stack, as well as to improve performance.

Based on a massively parallel, multinode platform, Primera uses the high-speed nonvolatile memory express interface and storage-class memory, which provides persistent storage at nearly the speed of random-access memory. The combination yields up to 1.5 million inputs/outputs per second and up to 45 megabits per second of bandwidth, said Sandeep Singh, vice president of storage marketing at HPE.

The operating software has been made more modular and decoupled from data services to enable updates and restarts to occur without an operating system reboot. Finally, a version of InfoSight tuned for the Primera platform can automatically resolve the vast majority of support issues, including those at the virtual machine layer, Singh said.

The task of correlating factors that impact performance across multiple on-premises and cloud platforms “can require millions of calculations, too much for humans to solve,” Singh said. That’s where machine learning-based intelligence can make a significant difference, he said.

“Flash sped things up but we’re now seeing only incremental gains,” Singh said. “The real game-changer is the AI-driven ability to predict and prevent issues and unlock insights.” The technology in Primera enabled one customer to avoid a $1.2 million storage upgrade because InfoSight identified a handful of rogue virtual desktop sessions that were more than doubling CPU utilization, Singh said.

HPE will begin taking orders for Primera in the third quarter. Pricing wasn’t announced.

Finally, HPE is further catalyzing its “intelligent edge” strategy with enhancements to Aruba Central, a cloud-based platform that combines network management, analytics, simulated user experience monitoring and security for wired, wireless and wide-area networks.

The company’s Analytics and Assurance network monitoring and management platform has been integrated with Aruba Central for faster network issue remediation and infrastructure optimization. Branch management and orchestration capabilities have been improved for WAN scenarios, primarily in large environments involving multiple data centers.

Network security policies can now be extended to workloads in the public cloud and a new software-as-a-service prioritization feature improves the performance of SaaS applications as well as in-user experience, HPE said. Security has also been simplified with policy enforcement down to the device and user. Network management workflow enhancements automate device provisioning, network health monitoring and troubleshooting across locations. Availability is set for July.

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